Someone recently sent me an unpublished manuscript to read and while the book itself had many things to recommend it, there was one sentence that made me laugh. I won’t use the same context because I don’t want to embarrass the author, but the gist of it was something like, “It’s so ironic that you brought garlic bread because I made marinara sauce!”

In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.

Of course, people have been misusing the word irony for a lot longer than Alanis Morrissette has been writing songs, but this one tickled me in particular, creating as it did something of a set theory paradox–a use of the word irony that did not mean irony but was nevertheless an unintended example of it. Wallace would be pleased by the circular nature of that, I suspect.

Several of these posts have pointed to Wallace’s expressed distaste for irony, but you never cease to find examples of people calling him an ironist. I’m sure this is related to his use of satire and especially metafictional techniques, which have long been associated with irony. But it’s hard to imagine anyone would read Infinite Jest with anything like a careful eye and not feel the earnestness with which it is written. Even when Wallace uses the word irony, it’s usually in a pejorative sense, either from the POV of the White Flaggers and their “irony free zone” or by a Canadian sneering at ironic Americans.

The introduction to my edition of IJ was written by Dave Eggers, who is often compared to Wallace. That connection is usually made through Eggers’ use of footnotes in the front matter to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is a memoir not a novel. And like Wallace, Eggers is often used as the critical poster boy for irony, despite the fact that Eggers might just be the most earnest writer we have.84

The truth is my generation, which is also the generation of Wallace and Eggers, has had irony imprinted on it. We grew up with Letterman and came of age with the Simpsons. In fact, with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this month, it’s been amusing for me and others my age to watch the seriousness with which the boomers take their nostalgia. The popular music of our own youth was terrible and we know it, but we have this arch fondness for Men at Work85 or whatever because it still triggers these sense memories of being young and worry-free and gloriously hormonal. What you have in Wallace and Eggers are writers who have instinctively appropriated this ironic reflex and put it in the service of sincerity–the techniques other writers have used to distance the author from the text they use instead to engage the reader with it.

On page 694, Wallace has a much more sophisticated take on the same idea:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté.

The mask is stuck there even on Wallace, but he has found a way to put it to nobler use.

I’ve seen people refer to this as post-irony, but that does nothing to clarify the issue (is a post-modernist not also modern?) and the issue needs clarification. Most people who have read neither writer (and some who have) still think they are leading contemporary examples of ironists.86 And the problem with that assumption is that everything they say then becomes suspect. Every time Eggers speaks, media-types and bloggers parse his words for the real meaning when the real meaning couldn’t be clearer.87 Wallace answers a simple question–What are ten books you like?88–and half the people don’t believe him.

I think IJ is powerful because it forces you to seriously confront your demons and addictions. There’s some quote early on about knowing more about whatever it is you are into rather than why you are really into it. It’s like a confrontation of irony.

In the 93 interview DFW did with the Review of Contemporary Fiction he says a lot of really illuminating things about irony. I can’t say it as well as he did, but he talks about how the self-reflexive instincts literary irony (and TV) have become sort of the language that we speak in the US. Like we are the fish and irony is the water. And I think what he is doing in IJ is using the same self-conscious techniques the po-mo ironists used, but instead of using them to poke holes in our understanding of self and what language can do he is trying to come to a solution as to how we can continue to be human in a society where all that stuff is a given.

Kevin — Excellent post. I think you hit the problem squarely when you write that most people don’t know the meaning of “irony,” confusing it with “sarcasm” or “hipness.”

I’ve been marvelling over the section from which you quote. DFW’s whole discussion of anhedonia — which today’s psychiatrists would probably label “dysthymia” — and what he calls “It” — meaning full-bore clinical depression. Having wrestled with these ailments for most of my adult life, I can say without pause that Wallace’s description is by far the most accurate that I’ve read. And, like so many depressed people, I’ve read enough books on the subject to fill a bathtub.

I don’t know how anyone can read this section (which focuses on Kate Gompert and Hal and Himself as metaphors for various types of depression) and have any trouble understanding the psychic AND physical horrors that Wallace experienced in his life.

The fact that he pulled this off without taking the easy pose of hiding behind irony — of using his own experiences to describe the spectrum of depressive illness — is downright amazing. This one section was, for me, the payoff I’d been waiting for. It’s the center of the spider’s web. I don’t know from fractals, but I’d venture a guess and say it’s the dominant pattern that’s replicated throughout the book. In short, to be able to look at life without irony is a worthy goal for grown-ups at all levels of development.

Wallace uses the word “naive” to describe the posture opposite from irony. I can’t think of anything better. Depressive people are anything but naive. We scheme, we suspect, we concoct, we manipulate — we do anything we can to keep It at bay long enough and well enough to live some semblance of a “naive” life, where we might let down our many layers of defense long enough to realize that naivete is not a sign of childishness or stupidity, but a gift similar to the awareness and mindfulness of our innocent selves.

I was going to write about this section in the forums. I’m glad you’ve given me an excuse to do a brain dump here on the main page. Again, thanks for an insightful post. Now, after 700 pages, I can look at Infinite Jest and realize that it is, indeed, a work of rare genius.

(And PS — the Roger Ebert piece is amazing. He’s using his blog to produce some of the most thoughtful stuff on the web. I’m glad you recommended his AA essay, and I also urge folks to go and take a look. You’ll be glad you did!)

In response to your first sentence: sarcasm is a form of irony, but I have heard other people say the same thing. I think it’s largely the same over-corrective symptom as with people using “my friend and I” as the object of the sentence. People have gotten so used to correcting the misuse of “irony” that these

I mean, not to piss in yr cereal or anything, just a little note. I think the “hip” aspect is more what you were after. It just happens to be that sarcasm (the lazy man’s irony) tends to be considered hip nowadays. Or at least, that’s what they tell me. I’m so unhip I can tighten my belt with my teeth.

Bernie — right you are. Sarcasm is a stepchild of irony. I’ll go one better and say that “hipness” is too. I had a hard time coming up with examples of non-ironic coolness in that first sentence. I probably should have just left it alone! Thanks for helping to clarify things.

Kevin, great job with this post, thank you! I wrote a few days ago on that quote from p. 694, and now you’ve charged me up to write another one, more straightforwadly on the idea of Post-Irony (see the ping just above).

In the mid- to late-nineties, I used to travel to Sweden a lot on business. It is a very sincere, non-ironic country, in my opinion. I had an American friend who lived there, who brought me over to work with him several times a year. One of the first times I saw him after he moved there, he explained to me how he had come to see Americans’ habitual irony and sarcasm, as it’s so lacking in Sweden. He particularly noted our tendency to speak to each other in a jokingly harsh manner — “Hey, you bastard!” etc. After living over there, he had come to view that kind of ironic joking as very jarring.

It was a revelatory moment for me (partially because we had always had that kind of faux-aggressive banter as part of our relationship). It’s been fifteen years, and I’m still aware of the aggressive, ironic edge to much interaction here. And it’s something like water to fish — I had to get out to become aware of it.

You just reminded me of a similar experience I had studying abroad (in Sweden as well). One of my first few days there, I said something snide or harsh to one of my new Dutch friends, and she was genuinely hurt by it, and in trying to justify that it was humorous or whatever, I realized, “Wait, I really AM being an asshole!” It’s been six years since I got back, but I still view that style of interacting with people as…childish, I guess? Or maybe just grating or antagonistic.

The fish-and-water “joke” is very appropriate here, and so many other places too.

[...] GQ has a solid index of douchey colleges. Duke is on it like a dozen time. – Via InfiniteSummer: An excellent argument that writers like Eggers and David Foster Wallace are not ironic. And irony sucks. – This new Drake [...]

Help. I’m a couple of years older than DFW and I notice the current usage of the word and concept “irony” seems synonymous with cynicism and/or sarcasm. I always think of irony as something w/ a twist related to the original intent of a word or experience. For example, “the safety pin stabbed the baby’s thigh when it popped open.” Would someone clarify? Did “irony” have a different, more circumscribed meaning when I was in college? When did its meaning expand?

As briefly as I can (and I’m sure someone will want to clarify this) irony generally means that the thing said is the opposite of what is intended. Stephen Colbert, for instance, is the classic ironist. He is pretending to be a conservative TV commentator in order to make fun of conservative TV commentators. I suspect the thing that muddies the semantic waters is “dramatic irony.” So Oedipus, who doesn’t know he’s adopted, leaves Corinth because of a prophecy that he will “lie with his mother” and [spoiler alert] ends up in Thebes where he murders his real father and unknowingly marries his real mother. So he took action specifically to avoid a certain result and because of those actions ends up fulfiling the prophecy anyway. Remembering all this vaguely from school, some people think irony is just a strange coincidence or anything unexpected, or even just anything unpleasant, when it’s actually more nuanced than that.

I dunno; I’m with ThisIsWater on this one. I think irony has to do with contradiction between intensions or purpose and outcome. Your Oedipus example is in accord with this, as is being stabbed by a safety pin.

Steven Colbert is a satirist– an ironist works at the dry cleaners, pressing shirts. I don’t think he’s ironic at all. On the other hand, it is ironic that many people get their news from the Daily Show. It would be ironic if conservatives watched Colbert because they agreed with his (expressed) views.

Satire may be Colbert’s genre, but this doesn’t mean he doesn’t also fit a pretty straightforward classical definition of verbal irony (saying one thing while intending that it be heard/understood as another).

Verbal Irony is a pretty wide arena. At one end are sophisticated satirists and wits like Colbert, where there is great cleverness in how they manipulate the difference from what they literally say and how they are understood. At the other end is raw sarcasm, which communicates its irony through basically nothing but a sort of snide tone of voice superimposed on a statement that isn’t otherwise particularly clever or revealing. (I have a memory of once reading some quote that sarcasm was the lowest form of irony, bu phrased really nice, but don’t remember who said it).

Somewhere in between (but closer to Sarcasm than Colbert) is the irony that I think we are talking about in recent IS discussions about DFW: the habit of adding a bit of a twist or archness to statements we think might otherwise look too sincere or naive. Doing exactly the thing that seems to puzzle Mario.

Basically, soaking everything in a low-level wash of verbal irony like a chicken breast in salted broth, that’s the (largely verbal) irony trap that DFW seems to want to provide alternatives to. I’m pretty sure the other varieties of irony I half-remember from lit theory and rhetoric aren’t really as much in his sites — anyone out there with a good argument for the psyche-corrupting powers of dramatic irony?

“In irony, a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness)

Although this is a relatively conventional description, it is consistent with the “original” ironist, Socrates, whose method entailed positing a self-annihilating belief and feigning his own ignorance in relation to the inherent contradictions of that belief.

The key, so far as I can tell, is that irony is not a meshing of two separate events/beliefs/speech acts, but rather a movement that takes place within a doubled event/belief/speech act.

The ironist may or may not believe that there is a resolution to this internal doubling. For instance, Donna Haraway, at the beginning of her Cyborg Manifesto, notes that “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true” (Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs). For Socrates, or so it is supposed, there are epistemological limits to our ability to dialectically resolve contradictions, but they do in fact resolve into eternal rational wholes. For Haraway, the tension remains but is further problematized by a shift in our social ontology (the Eschatonic map) that has disrupted the Western optic of modern philosophy.

I hear people say that reading straightforward ironic (“post-modern”) literature is repulsive. There are some reasons within irony itself why this might be the case, since it creates an unknowable (non-dialectical) object, at the possible expense of the reader.

Miker, There is no contradiction between a satirist and an ironist. Satirists often employ irony, although they don’t have to. The Daily Show is a satirical news show, but usually the correspondent segments are the only ones that are ironic. Colbert, on the other hand, is a perfect example of an ironic pose. He almost never breaks character and there is an obvious gap between what he says (“Bill O’Reilly is my hero and mentor”) and what he means (“Bill O’Reilly is a mouth-breathing idiot.”) That intentional distance between what is expressed and what is meant is irony.

Dramatic irony, which is what you’re talking about, is also irony, but it’s slightly different. It represents the gap between intentions and outcome. You set out on a path intending one result and you get a result that is completely the opposite of what you wanted. Personally, I’m not sure the diaper pin example quite meets the definition, but I wouldn’t really want to argue about it either.

Infinite Tasks is, as usual, several updates of the operating system ahead of me. You all should check out his site if you haven’t. One of the really cool things about this project is the number of parallel discussions going on at his site (and Infinite Zombies and Infinite Detox and A Supposedly Fun Blog and many others, some of which predated IS and which are usually cataloged by Matthew each Sunday). I haven’t quite digested the fractal nature of it all, but it might be a good thing to write about in the coming weeks.

Speaking of the Daily Show, did anybody catch the recent “feud” between Jon Stewart and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, culminating in Jon dressing up as Napoleon?

On one episode, Jon commented on how Scarborough was claiming to be ironic regarding his (Scarborough’s) show’s sponsorship by Starbucks. Jon said something to the effect of, “I get it, you’re not a sellout. You’re a `sellout.’”

In other words, just add scare quotes to the word, act like you’re goofing on it, and voila… irony, or something like that.

the conventional definition of “dramatic irony” is that the audience knows something that the characters don’t. the dramatic irony in ‘oedipus rex’ is that WE know he’s marrying his mother, and HE doesn’t.

That’s true, but it’s only half the equation. It’s not enough that we know something the characters don’t, there needs to be a direct contradiction between what the audience knows and the characters believe. The fact that we know Rosebud is a sled and the characters in Citizen Kane don’t isn’t especially ironic.

Obviously if we didn’t know who Oedipus’s real parents were (and neither did he), we’d be left with the earnest version of that play in which Oedipus successfully evades the prophecy by murdering a king in another town and marrying the king’s wife. Not nearly as good.

(Maybe Citizen Kane is a bad example. If I remember correctly “Rosebud” was code for a potentially embarrassing bit of gossip about the real WR Hearst, and so that movie involved a whole other layer of knowing–what Hearst knew vs. what Welles knew vs. what the audience knew vs the benign nature of what Rosebud turned out to be in the film. No wonder people are constantly confused about this irony business.)

So is it correct to assume that sometime right before Pynchon to the present, in the groves of academe, the definition of irony has been dumbed down, diluted, or broadened? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard/seen Gen X-ers and Y-ers say “irony” when they’re being sarcastic or cynical or hiply jaded. I’m one of those on the cusp people not a boomer, not an Xer …

If anyone would know the precise meaning(s) of irony it would be Our Man.

Fascinating, erudite discussion (and I mean that sincerely). Now can someone please tell me whether it is ironic that the title of James Incandenza’s movie “Infinite Jest”, a lethal Entertainment that captures you as soon as you watch it, is also the title of the novel “Infinite Jest” in which it appears, a difficult, book, serious in intent, that deliberately seems to put off the casual reader for at least a couple hundred pages? I think it is, but maybe I’m not understanding DFW’s intent.

These modern theories of rhetoric distinguish between three types of irony: verbal, dramatic and situational.

* Verbal irony is a disparity of expression and intention: when a speaker says one thing but means another, or when a literal meaning is contrary to its intended effect. An example of this is sarcasm.
* Dramatic irony is a disparity of expression and awareness: when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.
* Situational irony is the disparity of intention and result: when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect. Likewise, cosmic irony is disparity between human desires and the harsh realities of the outside world (or the whims of the gods). By some definitions, situational irony and cosmic irony are not irony at all.

I think this was discussed a lot right after David died and people were trying to find suicide notes and calls for help and red flags all over his work.

IMHO, DFW was frustrated by being thought of as a wunderkind, known mostly for literary pyrotechnics and footnotes (which some considered pretentious). As his later work suggests and as is evident in Oblivion, This is Water and, as I understand it, The Pale King,
he was approaching the authentic, be-here-now sensibility. Sometimes I wonder if his attempts to wean from his medication were a (misguided) attempt to achieve the kind of pure consciousness one associates
w/ Buddhism. For me, the takeaway from DFW (aside from overall delight and awe and usage) is empathy.